Three CISAC scientists have joined 26 of the nation’s top nuclear experts to send an open letter to President Obama in support of the Iran deal struck in July.

“The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) the United States and its partners negotiated with Iran will advance the cause of peace and security in the Middle East and can serve as a guidepost for future non-proliferation agreements,” the group of renowned scientists, academics and former government officials wrote in the letter dated August 8, 2015.

“This is an innovative agreement, with much more stringent constraints than any previously negotiated non-proliferation framework.”

CISAC senior fellow and former Los Alamos National Laboratory director Sig Hecker is a signatory to the letter, along with CISAC co-founder Sid Drell, and cybersecurity expert and CISAC affiliate Martin Hellman.

Six Nobel laureates also signed, including FSI senior fellow by courtesy and former Stanford Linear Accelerator director Burton Richter.

The letter arrives at a crucial time for the Obama administration as it rallies public opinion and lobbies Congress to support the Iran agreement.

You can read the full letter along with analysis from the New York Times at this link.

Interstate conflicts are "roaring back," according to James Fearon. One of the preeminent thinkers in the field of international relations, Fearon joins Colin Kahl on the World Class podcast to talk about why it feels like wars are becoming more prevalent, and how more might be prevented in the future. Drawing on both his academic research and his time in government service, Fearon shares his perspective on why and how the conflicts in Ukraine and Iran are unfolding, and outlines his recommendations for preventing active conflict with China in the Indo-Pacific.

James Fearon is the Theodore and Frances Geballe Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences and a professor of political science. He is a senior fellow at FSI, affiliated with CISAC and CDDRL. His research interests include civil and interstate war, ethnic conflict, the international spread of democracy and the evaluation of foreign aid projects promoting improved governance. Fearon was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2012 and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2002. Some of his current research projects include work on the costs of collective and interpersonal violence, democratization and conflict in Myanmar, nuclear weapons and U.S. foreign policy, and the long-run persistence of armed conflict.

This episode's reading recommendation is, “The Personalist Global Order: When Individual Whims Drive Great Power Policy” by Seva Gunitsky and Semuhi Sinanoglu, published in the January 2026 issue of Foreign Affairs.

TRANSCRIPT:

Kahl: You're listening to World Class from the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. I'm your host, Colin Kahl, the director of FSI.

Today we're talking to my good friend, Jim Fearon. Jim is the Theodore and Francis Geballe professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences here at Stanford. He's also a professor in the political science department and a senior fellow with us at FSI. He is inarguably one of the most influential international relations theorists and methodologists of his generation.

He's also spent some time serving in the U.S. government, and he's about to begin a term as the co-director of FSI's Center for International Security and Cooperation, or CISAC, which is one of our flagship centers. Jim's research covers an incredibly broad array of international security issues, including pathbreaking work on interstate war, conventional and nuclear deterrence, civil and ethnic conflict, the international spread of democracy, and its impact on political stability, and the evaluation of foreign aid projects.

He's even branched out to study the cost of collective and interpersonal violence, and he has a terrific new book on the topic entitled Worse Than War. As the world grapples with a new period of heightened conflict and global tension, I can't think of a better person to help us think through these challenges and help lead CISAC in examining them than Jim.

So, Jim, welcome to World Class.
  
Fearon: Thanks, Colin. Very happy to be here.

Kahl: I want to start our conversation by rolling the tape way back. Three decades ago, you published a highly influential article entitled, “Rationalist Explanations of War.” The article addresses a core puzzle in international relations. And that is, you know, because war is costly and risky, a peaceful settlement that avoids destruction should theoretically always exist and be preferred by rational actors, and yet war still occurs. These days, unfortunately, it seems to be occurring more and more often.

So I want to ask you how the insights from this foundational article might help us understand some contemporary conflicts, including those in Europe and the Middle East.

But first—a lot of our listeners are pretty nerdy, but many of them will not have read your article. Maybe you can spend a few minutes just kind of explaining to our listeners the core argument you made in this.

Fearon: You're right; it is a frighteningly long time ago now. Scary for me to think about. 1995 it came out, written pretty much in ‘93.

I guess I’d stress two things in terms of summarizing it. One, even the way you framed it as, war is costly and risky, there ought to be deals, in principle, that rationally led states would prefer to the costly lottery, the costly big gamble of going to war. That was itself a framing that was not standard at the time.

And in fact the reason I wrote the article in that form — I was an assistant professor at University of Chicago and I had a different version based on a chapter of my dissertation. And a senior colleague very generously giving me extensive comments on that draft, disagreed vigorously with that point and said, “No, no, no, no, and here's a list of cases where both sides wanted to go to war, and there were just no deals.”

And that interaction made me realize, well, actually, you know, there's maybe there's a point here that that would be worth arguing out there in the field.

And then the other thing was I wanted to ask, “What are the full set of rationalist explanations for why rational leaders wouldn't be able to find a deal better than this costly lottery?” And basically I say there's two things. There's kind of informational stories and commitment stories.

“Informational story”  means that one or both sides thinks they know something about either their capabilities or maybe their willingness to fight, which they know privately, the other side can't directly observe it. And because if you told me, like, “Don't do that or I absolutely will go to war.” I might not believe you because I know that  you have an incentive to try to get me not to do that.

And then the second thing: commitment problems.That's when even if we largely agree on the probability of winning would be 50-50 or something, and have a good sense of what the costs would be, even if we know there's deals we'd both prefer to fighting, we may believe that one or the other or both of us would not be trustworthy to enforce a deal.

An example would be Iran and cases like that where we might want to make a deal — we give you some sanctions relief, and you agree to intrusive inspections and not to pursue nuclear weapons. But how do we know they're not going cheat? We think they might have reasons to. So that's the kind of concern. Maybe there in principle is a deal, but you're worried the other side has ways of sneakily or not so sneakily reneging.

Kahl: The Iran point is is particularly relevant to my personal experience because I remember during the Biden administration, it was very difficult for us to convince Iran to get back into some version of the Obama-era Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, because I Iran kept wanting us to credibly commit that we would not withdraw from the agreement, like Trump withdrew from Obama's agreement. And it turned out that was very difficult for us to commit to. Of course, we also had trust issues as it related to the Iranians.

But speaking of Iran, we're now past the six-month mark in the U.S. and Israeli war with Iran. We're mostly in the U.S. phase these days.

And we're now in the fifth year of the war in Ukraine. So we've got major conflicts in Europe and the Middle East.

But I was wondering if you could link back to some of those concepts that you just elucidated to help our listeners understand, for example, why Putin made the decision to launch a full-fledged invasion of Ukraine back in 2022, or why President Trump decided to attack Iran alongside Israel back in February.

Fearon: Well, you've given a couple significant challenges here on the “rationalist” part. So, one thing I absolutely was not arguing or claiming in that piece was that all wars are begun by rational choices, and that this was the way to understand why all wars happen.

My hunch is that this decision to go to war was irrational. Say you have a specific psychological bias in mind that may explain it. Psychological biases and irrationality is defined on the basis of, or with respect to, “It's not rational.” Rational is like the normative, like, okay, you ought to do this, or if you're rational, you would do this. And that's how we even can tell what would be irrational.

In order to even figure out what's a psychological bias story, you have to be starting with a clear sense of what would count as a rational story.

So that's a little background on the motivation there. I'm definitely not saying that this current U.S. war with Iran is going to be best explained by rational choices. But to your point, I do think the information and commitment story helps us understand the underlying strategic problems that the leaders are dealing with and states are dealing with and may manage or address in more or less rational ways.

So with that as like a long lead up, let's start . . . well, we’ve been talking about Iran. Let's start there.

We only have a little reporting on this now, but it seems like the president really, like, went with his gut. Even despite getting . . . the CIA allegedly told him that what Netanyahu was telling him that this can bring about regime change . . . he was allegedly told by the U.S. intelligence community, “No, we really don't think that's gonna happen.” The ability of the Iranians to shut down the Strait of Hormuz seems to have been raised.

But he decides and probably is influenced by feeling like the Venezuela operation was a huge success. Ex post, it looks like he exaggerated his prospects for success.

It doesn't seem to me like there was anything to suggest that the U.S. had any particular private information about their capabilities or anything that would give them a rational basis for having mutual optimism with respect to the Iranians. The Israelis had these rather extensive plans for internal subversion, for regime change, but it seems like the U.S. intel didn't think that was likely to succeed.

At a more underlying level though, the whole issue for years now, fifteen plus years, has been this commitment problem issue of the U.S. worrying that if the Iranians got nuclear weapons, this would have various bad effects for a balance of power in the region and possible consequences for us on that.

You were intimately involved in dealing with this commitment issue in the JCPOA talks. And as you know, one of the big criticisms of the JCPOA talks was that it's not credible. That the Iranians would be able to cheat, pursue, get out of the deal, and that the only real solution here is regime change.

And their argument one way or another, ends up succeeding, in terms of getting the U.S. president to act on it. It has not succeeded, so far, on regime change, and we'll see what happens there.

Kahl: One thing that seems to be similar about the Ukraine and Iran cases, and wonder what your impression is, but before the war, in both instances, there were diplomatic engagements.

The United States was engaged with Russia to try to convince them that the war wouldn't work out well for them, that the costs would be high, but also in conversations to see whether a broader U.S.-Russia understanding about security in Europe could be discussed to address some of the security concerns that Putin had about Ukraine and about the eastern flank of NATO.

The zone of possible agreement was pretty narrow and there were huge commitment issues. They didn't trust us; we didn't trust them. So, that resonates.

Same with Iran. We were in the midst of negotiations with them. They didn't trust us. We didn't trust them. We had pretty maximalist demands. They had pretty maximalist demands on issues like enrichment. And so the zone of possible agreement was narrow, and trust just made it difficult to to find a diplomatic solution, which means you were kind of in the zone where war could be imagined in both Ukraine and in Iran.

But what's interesting is that both Putin and Trump believed certain types of information rather than others, and basically they believed the wars would be easy. Putin thought the war in Ukraine would be over in a couple of weeks. Trump thought the war in Iran would be over in a couple of days, maybe a couple of weeks. They were getting information from different advisors, but either they were believing certain advisors or they just had very firm beliefs in their own heads about how easy this was going to be that couldn't be shaken. They just thought the wars would be easy.

So if you kind of combine the zone of possible agreement and commitment issues being pretty problematic, and then both leaders thought the wars would be easy, maybe there's some commonality between the conflicts. I don't know if that resonates with some of your views.

Fearon: It does, and I think you're right; there are some similarities there. In both cases, I think the underlying issues have to do with revisionism plus anarchy making for credible commitment problems.

One thing that the Iran case and the Ukraine case have in common [is] they’re wars of regime change, or at least, to a large extent. Putin wants to go to Kyiv, throw out the regime, establish something different or incorporate almost the entire current Ukrainian state into Russia.

When you see regime change as the primary objective, you should think “commitment problem.” This was true in the 2003 U.S.-Iraq war, where the Bush administration really wasn't that interested in cutting a deal with Saddam Hussein. They thought we had an opportunity to change the regime, make things a lot less costly, a lot better. Either he’s working on nuclear weapons now or he's going be able to soon. 9/11 gives us this great opportunity with the U.S. public to to do this.

World War II for the Allies: Churchill and Roosevelt meet in Casablanca early on, well before they have any good reason to think that they're going to be able to defeat, do a landing, and drive all the way to Berlin. But they declare at that point our goal is unconditional surrender. We just have to get rid of this regime. Why is that? Well, they don't think that any deal with Hitler would be stable. Because he's revealed enough about his preferences that he wouldn't comply.

That combines in both the Iranian and the Ukraine case with what, after the fact, look like quite overly optimistic views. In the Ukraine case, ex post we can see like, “Oh gosh, you really miscalculated.” This was not a one-week special military operation. It's five years of staggering, staggering World War I-like losses and lack of progress. So, surely he was irrational in getting that wrong.

But as I recall in the first week or so, people I heard in the Pentagon were like, “Yeah, this is going to be over. It's gonna take them like a week or two, but they're going to win.” And that was also a view that wasn’t just in the U.S. It's not just Putin who was surprised; a lot of people were surprised. There's some interesting reporting in a series of Washington Post pieces in late 2022 where they're talking to Ukrainian military and political leaders, and they were surprised to some extent. They were not a hundred percent sure, ex ante that you would see the degree of coordination, nationalist enthusiasm, support, pulling together, that they actually saw. So even they were a little bit surprised.

I do think that there's a plausible argument for mutual optimism, as we say, that some private information contributed to the sum of their beliefs about their chances of winning being greater than one. The Russians seem to really dismiss the Ukrainian’s capability and they thought that people would defect from the regime, that there wouldn't be a lot of public support, which was totally wrong.

Kahl: I think that's right. Maybe this was a byproduct of the fact that all the senior advisors to the Secretary of Defense were Army guys, and the Secretary of Defense himself was an Army guy back when the invasion happened. But when they all were all looking at the giant green map, and I say that because it was literally this huge green map that Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, would roll out on the table in the Secretary's Conference room and start pointing to what the Russians were intending to do based on all the insights and intel that we had.

I think our military, again, these Army guys, basically saw a repeat of 2003 Iraq, which was that the major combat phase of the war and the regime change part of the war might be over in a couple of weeks, right? You'd have the equivalent of a thunder run to Kyiv, like we had the thunder run to Baghdad. But also like Iraq, in the aftermath of that, Ukrainian nationalism was real, resistance was real, and that you'd have a combination of basically insurgency, civil uprisings and disobedience, serious occupation problems.

Milley is talking to Gerasimov, his counterpart in Russia before the war, he's saying, “Look, you think this war is going to be over in fourteen days, but it's going to last fourteen years.”

But when Milley was saying that, he was talking about the post-war, post-regime change difficulties that we faced in Iraq. I think it was a shock about how poorly the Russians performed. It certainly was a shock on our side. And also how well the Ukrainians performed, and not the least of which because the Ukrainians didn't appear to have a plan. But I think in retrospect, they did have a plan. They just didn't share the plan with us because they didn't trust us all that much. So there were some information asymmetries.

I think the biggest one that Putin had was not just what we now see as his overconfidence in how easy it would be to change the regime, but he didn't believe us when we said we would impose a lot of costs on him: support the Ukrainians, imposing costs, sanctions, a degree of international isolation. He just didn't believe any of that stuff.

Okay. You've already mentioned that you worked at the Pentagon. We worked together in 2021, 2022. You took some leave from Stanford to serve in the Strategy Office within the Office of the Secretary of Defense.

For our listeners, the Office of the Secretary of Defense is not literally the secretary's office; it's a huge, sprawling civilian bureaucracy that supports the Secretary. And Jim worked in the strategy shop. And specifically, you had an opportunity to work on the 2022 National Defense Strategy, which is an important intellectual and framing document for the Pentagon.

It's kind of a meta document that tries to translate the national security strategy into a defense strategy that can be operationalized by the Pentagon. I believe this was your first time working in government, and I'd love you to reflect on that experience a little bit. Because obviously you've spent all this time in the ivory tower. You're hugely influential in the field of international relations.

What impact did this experience of being in the bowels of the Pentagon for a year or so . . . what impact did it have in shaping your understanding about the policy process or maybe your thinking about international security more broadly?

Fearon: Well, the opportunity for that year was largely due to you. So I have you to thank for that. And it was an amazing experience and it was a great thing to do in mid- late-career to kind of shake things up. And I learned just a massive amount. I’d say I’m still . . . in terms of lessons, too many to count. I'm still really processing it all. I'm trying to clear off a bunch of various longstanding projects so I can start thinking more systematically and trying to write about that.

The experience didn't really end up changing my views about international politics. Although I've got a lot more good anecdotes, it didn't really change the way I teach “Intro IR” that much.

But it radically . . . I just learned a ton about how U.S. foreign policy and defense policy is made inside the machine. And that's just been fascinating. And that has affected . . . when I read the newspaper or read about what's going on in the world, it definitely informs how I understand a lot of stuff that I see happening.

We talk a ton about policy makers and policy making in our academic IR world. And not just political science in general. What did I think? Well, I didn't know. Maybe you go in and like you sit around a table with a bunch of policymakers and you go like, “Hmm, what should our policy be on this question?” You know? And it'll be a little bit like a seminar, maybe?

Occasionally I saw stuff that was a little bit like that. And maybe at levels that you experience more at higher levels, maybe that happens more. But that was like not the way it works at all, right?

Instead, it's like a gazillion meetings.with people from different offices, and offices within offices, and offices within offices within offices at a gazillion levels and across different agencies talking about, “How do we align?”

It turns out policymaking is basically all about aligning things, aligning things with other things. It's about coordination. You have a notion when we're talking about policy in the newspaper journalist sense, it's very simple, right? Is the policy going to be this or that? But in actuality: what's a policy? It's not one simple thing. It's like a million things. It's a million little decisions.

And you can’t, even when you say, if you’re the Undersecretary, “I think we should do this.” Well that goes down the chain, and then what comes back are like a million, “Well we can't do that because of this, or that causes this friction, or we can't do that because of this other thing.” So that was one thing that was really striking.

It's a world of silos. Silos and silos within silos. And we talk about silos as if they're bad, but the truth is that you have to have silos. The whole system's a silo. You've got State Department and you've got Homeland Security and you've got the Defense Department and Treasury. And you need specialists in these different areas, and expertise. And someone's going to be lead on this or that policy. But at the same time, once you create all these silos, they have to coordinate. And that’s what so much of policy was about. It was about all these meetings of aligning across and within silos.

Kahl: Totally. Whether it's policy percolating from the bottom up or you're trying to implement it from the top down, the vast majority of what people in the U.S. government do is try to align and coordinate their actions. Either align it to their preferences — like their organizational preferences or their individual preferences — or align it to a policy that they think is already set, while deconflicting with everybody else.

It's basically a hot mess. It's surprising, actually, that anything gets done.

I was thinking as you were talking: probably the most famous scholar-practitioner of all time is Henry Kissinger. And Kissinger once remarked about when he was back at Harvard as an academic, he learned things. He built up all this intellectual capital. And then he went into government and he spent it all down. Implying that he didn't really build up more intellectual capital inside government, that that happened outside of government.

My sense is that Kissinger was a brilliant guy, but that he's absolutely wrong about that. Every time I've served in government, my intellectual capital went up, including in domains that I had not been exposed to before. So, I do want to ask about whether your intellectual capital changed at all on some issues you thought deeply about.

In particular, during your time at the Pentagon, was there anything that you learned about the world or how DOD conducts its planning and operations that changed your understanding of contemporary deterrence challenges? Because after all, the national defense strategy that you work so hard on in the strategy office framed as its central challenge, sustaining and strengthening deterrence vis-a-vis potential adversaries with China and Russia kind of at the top of the pile. Given that you’ve thought a lot about deterrence as an academic, you then saw how people were debating it in these endless meetings on the inside: did it shape your thinking at all?

Fearon: Well, the overarching frame of the 2022 national defense strategy was integrated deterrence. And initially I was like, what does that mean? Do we need another deterrence concept?

But the more time I spent there, the more I thought actually, you know, that's right. The U.S. and its allies and partners have an amazing set of strengths, but you need to make the whole greater than the sum of the parts. So now we're talking about silos not only within the U.S. government, but with allies and partners. There's a whole other set of very difficult coordination challenges.

It's incredibly challenging. I worked on implementation, as you know, until I left in September 2022, and I saw some stuff that happened after that, but my impression is that the agenda of integration had more successes inside the defense establishment than across agencies. And it seems like that coordinating across agencies was just really hard for all kinds of reasons.

But let me come back. You want to know about the intellectual capital. I didn't feel like I was spending down intellectual capital. I did think that, for example, in doing the national defense strategy, I was able to bring some stuff to the table conceptually from having studied and written about deterrence for quite a while.

But in terms of what I got, it goes to what we were just talking about being really struck by the scale and the organizational challenges. When you're coming from academics, or for that matter journalists, or for that matter really historians, there are all kinds of incentives to see and understand and also blinders to put things in very psychological terms.

So although I think psychology is hugely important, the experience made me think that we're over-emphasizing in a lot of ways, or we’re attributing things to psychological biases or this or that that are actually have more to do with organizational and career incentive things that are very difficult to to see from the outside.

Kahl: Yeah. I think in part that’s because it's like a nature-nurture question. Do our beliefs emerge from our experiences, in which case they are to some degree byproducts of our experience and to include it inside government.

I think your integrated deterrence point is interesting because a lot of critics of that defense said that integrated deterrence is just deterrence. Like deterrence is deterrence. In fact, you’re saying “integrated” because you want to actually slough off deterrence on other actors: the State Department or the Treasury Department, or our allies.

And I think the way that we saw it was that it was a recognition of the reality that if deterrence is either about denying the adversary the ability to achieve their objectives, or credibly being able to threaten to impose costs in excess of what they might achieve through aggression, that you had to have the entire kit available to you to do that, which meant you had to deter across the domains of warfare: land, air, sea, undersea, space, cyberspace, information, all of those.

The military kind of, I think, understood that, although implementation-wise it wasn't great at it. You had to deter across our alliances for the point that you made, that the whole had to add up to more than the sum of its parts. And that's a really hard coordination problem.

But you also had to integrate across the instruments of national power so that you're not just threatening to do things militarily, but as we've we've seen in places like Ukraine and Iran, the military instrument hits certain limits on your ability to achieve national objectives if it's not in tight coordination with diplomacy and economic carrots and sticks and other things.

The Trump administration didn't use the term “integrated deterrence” in their most recent national defense strategy. My suspicion is that people are largely thinking about deterrence in similar ways.

Fearon: An example would be in the lead up and through the whole Ukraine experience, Treasury is brought in. It does all kinds of stuff and does all kinds of analysis on the whole sanction side in terms of actions. But getting coordination to use that experience or do advanced planning on some kind of parallel contingency in the Western Pacific; that's hard to do.

Kahl: Very hard to do. But, you know, interestingly . . . we threatened Putin with all the things we ended up doing: supporting the Ukrainians, imposing sanctions, trying to isolate Russia on the world stage, which worked for about a year and a half or two. It's since kind of fallen apart.

My own view is that if Putin had known the cost that would have been imposed on him, he probably wouldn't have launched the war. We told him what many of those costs were, he just didn't believe us. My assessment of Beijing is yes, if they ever make a move on Taiwan or Japan or the Philippines, in one of these disputed areas: South China Sea, East China Sea, or the Taiwan Strait.

They will not just be calculating whether their military operations would be successful or whether they could dissuade the United States from intervening, but they'll be calculating what the impact would be on China's economy, on their regime stability, on a whole host of issues that are not entirely military and have significant economic and diplomatic elements to them. So, I think it's just only sensible to try to bundle up the various deterrence messaging so that Beijing thinks not only would they face a long hard slog if they went after Taiwan, but they'd also face sanctions or disruptions to critical supply chains or economic isolation from key economies around the world and et cetera, et cetera.

I do want to talk a little bit more about China and deterrence and get your views. You wrote a very interesting article in Foreign Affairs last year about how to think through conventional deterrence with China. So, much more in the military domain. And I wonder if the prospect of China taking action against Taiwan or another U.S. ally or partner is one of the pathways in which you could get a massive global conflagration? How should we think about deterring that?

Fearon: So, this was an article in Foreign Affairs in May or June last year with Andrew Lim, who's a very smart, experienced civil servant in OSD policy.

The basic idea is like, how do you sustain and strengthen deterrence as the 2022 NDS said, in the Western Pacific? We argue that the U.S. needs to work towards what we call the conventional triad. So, more investment in precision-guided missiles and deeper munition stocks in that area. Basically missiles, bombers, and subs. So, bombers that can be used to launch long-range cruise missiles. That's a technology called palletized munitions, as you know.

One thing we were trying to draw attention to is that there are pretty big first strike incentives. So, if you get in a tense or a crisis situation, the PLA has a real premium on preventing the U.S. forces from getting in the fight. And they built a missile complex that, if they used it successfully, very quickly could make it impossible, or very, very difficult, or could be devastating for U.S. naval assets and fixed bases in the region, which are critical for any kind of U.S. military intervention.

The U.S. knows that, wants to protect its forces. It has potentially preemption incentives itself to attack and prevent these missiles, or the command and control systems that enable them, from working. The whole article is based on this kind of analogy to the nuclear history where Albert Wohlstetter and Thomas Schelling were arguing in the 50s that the U.S. needed to posture its nuclear forces in a way to assure a second strike.

They were worrying — probably worrying too much — that the Soviets could have an incentive to just . . . what do we call it? . . . do a splendid first strike, to make it impossible or largely impossible for the U.S. to retaliate.

So, we're arguing that the situation is similar at a conventional level in the Western Pacific. So you could increase both crisis stability, lower the risk of war, and also strengthen deterrence by building an assured, secure, conventional second strike.

Kahl: The article is fantastic. People should check it out.

One of the concerns you hear out of the Pentagon these days . . . not at the very top, but through the many leaks that get into the Washington Post and the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal and other outlets . . . is just how concerned the professional military is and the combatant commands are with how depleted our long-range munitions stockpiles and also our air defense and missile defense interceptor stockpiles are, in large part because of the conflict with Iran, which has spent through a lot of those munitions.

The not so dirty little secret in the Pentagon is we had lots of war plans. But if you executed any one of them with a degree of protraction, you basically made the other war plans very difficult to execute for some period of time.

And we're we're seeing that happen in real time and we've kind of gone all in with Iran. And I think a lot of people at the Pentagon are worried that that has undermined our deterrent vis-a-vis China and and Russia, because they know how depleted we are on some of these types of munitions.

I want to pivot now to your new job, the job you have graciously agreed to take on, which is the social science co-director of CISAC, the Center for International Security and Cooperation.

For our listeners who don't know about CISAC, it's one of the oldest centers, one of the founding centers of FSI at Stanford. And it's always had, from the very beginning, a social science co-director and a science co-director. Because from the very outset, it's been a center focused on the relationship between science and technology on the one hand and international security on the other, initially focused on nuclear weapons and arms control, and now with a much broader research agenda.

So first of all, thank you for taking on the job. You're the perfect person at this time.

What types of issues do you think CISAC in particular, and maybe security studies more broadly, needs to prioritize at this particular moment in world history and as we look to the future?

Fearon: I'm excited to do it. I'm looking forward to it. It's a great opportunity, and I'm fully expecting that being a center director will be more fun than being a department chair.

Taking kind of a big picture look here: Secretary Blinken used to like to say the post-Cold War is over, right? And I think he's right about that. We're living through a really big set of changes in the international system. Probably bigger and more fundamental than the changes I lived through as a grad student with the end of the Cold War. Really quite fundamental.

This is a whole bunch of dimensions, but definitely one of the biggest ones is that interstate conflict among major powers has just come roaring back. After twenty-five years or so, where a lot of the issues of focus in international security were things like civil war, transnational terrorism, insurgency, counterinsurgency, state building, peacekeeping operations, non-proliferation. Now, none of those things have gone away; it upsets me that civil war in particular, which has actually gotten quite a bit worse, has kind of just fallen off the radar screen.

But nonetheless, good reason to be concerned about major power conflict, which has come back very much, and with it, increased risk of nuclear war. We haven't seen so much risk of this since the hot days of the Cold War. But it's come back in a technological context that's really different from the Cold War.

And I think that's where studying, thinking about, conceptualizing, framing, intervening on, like, how to think about and what to do about major power conflict in this technologically changed and rapidly changing environment is what CISAC will be focused on. And that CISAC, being at Stanford, is the place to do this: to study AI and and AI and international security implications for conflict, cyber offense, cyber defense, cyber capabilities and and and their implications.

There's something of an underreported arms race going on in space. That's another thing I'd love to get more work going on. Space capabilities have become absolutely essential enablers for military operations of not just the U.S., but perhaps especially still the U.S.

Kahl: I'm super excited about all of that. I'm not excited about the world we live in; the world seems more turbulent and violent by the day. But as it relates to CISAC: CISAC's core mission of thinking about how academia can inform questions about nuclear deterrence and nuclear stability and arms control, that's back.

The salience of nuclear weapons is arguably higher than it's been in many decades. And then there are all these emerging technology areas: cyber, AI, space, undersea, in the not too distant future, quantum. And what's interesting about it is that they are all entangled with one another. AI and cyber are highly entangled. Cyber and space are highly entangled. Cyber and undersea are highly entangled. Quantum will be highly entangled with other domains as well, and all of them are entangled with nuclear weapons, nuclear deterrence, nuclear command and control.

And so as you said, there's no place on earth to study all of these things, all of this intersectionality like CISAC. I'm super excited that you're going to take that on.

The last question I always ask our guests: so, Ezra Klein — one of my favorite podcasts — always asks his guests for three favorite books. And I'm always always impressed that non-academics, let alone academics, have time to read three books.

I have an easier question, which is: what is one article that you would recommend to our listeners to get a better understanding of contemporary international security challenges?

Fearon: So, my suggestion here is a little bit of a departure from what we've been talking about. It's not really hard on the military emerging tech, nuclear defense policy things, but more of a how to think about what's going on in the world.

I like a piece in Foreign Affairs by an IR political scientist named Seva Gunitsky and co-author Semuhi Sinanoglu. It's called “The Personalist Global Order: When Individual Whims Drive Great Power Policy.” And they make an argument that Trump and Xi Jinping to some extent, and Putin are. . . to understand how they're acting in foreign policy, it really helps to draw on this comparative politics.

People who study autocracy have a set of commonly used distinctions between types of autocracies. A personalist is in contrast to, like, a military dictator or a single party regime. Someone who governs by personal patron-client connections, often family-based, and views institutions as potential threats and tends to want to undermine them. And there's a bunch of patterns associated with personalist autocrats. There's a lot of erratic behavior.

In general, I think the IR field doesn’t pay enough attention to comparative politics, and this is a place where if you're looking to understand what's going on at the international level, it's a concept that's quite useful.

Kahl: It is a great article. And I also think where international relations can come to bear is in thinking about how these personalist systems become intertwined. The way in which Trump's network is intertwined with the networks in the Persian Gulf monarchies, for example. Great recommendation. Folks should go check it out if they haven't already.

Jim, thank you so much for joining us today.

Fearon: Thanks, Colin.

Kahl: You've been listening to World Class from the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. If you like what you're hearing, please leave us a review and be sure to subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts to stay up to date on what is happening in the world, and why.

TRANSCRIPT:

Kahl: You’re listening to World Class from the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. I’m your host, Colin Kahl, the director of FSI.

On February 28, the United States and Israel launched a major military campaign against Iran with profound implications for the Middle East and beyond. Given the urgency of this topic and our desire to bring our podcast listeners insights from scholars here at Stanford’s FSI, we’re doing something a little different on today’s episode.

We’re bringing you a panel discussion on the Iran war held at FSI on March 4, moderated by professor Jim Goldgeier. It features a conversation with me, Abbas Milani, and Ori Rabinowitz.

Jim Goldgeier is a research affiliate at the Center for International Security and Cooperation here at FSI and a professor at the School of International Service at American University.

Abbas Milani is the Hamid and Christina Moghadam Director of Iranian Studies at Stanford University, a visiting professor in the department of political science, and a research fellow and co-director of the Iran Democracy Project at the Hoover Institution.

Ori Rabinowitz is a tenured senior lecturer at the International Relations Department at the Hebrew University in Israel, and a visiting fellow of Israel studies here at FSI.

So without further ado, here’s our panel discussion.

[BEGIN EVENT AUDIO]

Goldgeier:  Welcome everyone, thanks so much for coming today. Thanks for those who organized this event for moving with lightning speed to put this together. I’m Jim Goldgeier. I’m a research affiliate at CISAC and at CDDRL, and I’m delighted to moderate this panel with these three experts.

Abbas, let's start with you for an understanding of what's going on inside Iran.

Milani: Well, first of all, my understanding is about three hours old. Things are changing so rapidly, and there's so much we don't know,

We don't know, for example, whether Iran has chosen a successor to Mr. Khamenei. We are fairly sure, or some people even doubt that, that Mr. Khamenei is dead. Some people think they have whisked him away. But I think, credibly, they're organizing burials for him.

But we don't know whether there is a successor. We don't know whether the committee, the council, the 86-man council that is supposed to pick the successor has met. We know they haven't met where Israel bombed and thought that they were bombing the meeting. But they are meeting on Zoom and trying to figure out the successor.

We had known for several years that Khamenei had been trying to place his son as the successor. There had been many meetings with high ranking ayatollahs and within that 86 men body to line up his son, Mojtaba, about whom I'll tell you a little bit.

He did not succeed by all accounts. There was resistance to him from the elder clergy. He is clearly a man of no experience outside being his daddy's central chief of staff. As far as I know, there is only one five-minute talk of him that has ever been publicly shown. It's a class that he taught in theology. And they showed that only because they wanted to indicate that he's now at the level that he can be the successor. In order to be a successor, you need to have the equivalent of a PhD. They had him teach a graduate course in theology, and they put that online. As far as I know, that's the only public lecture of him we have.

Yesterday there was news from one of Iran’s satellite TVs claiming that that committee had met and under command of the IRGC essentially named Khamenei's son as the new leader. Today there is less doubt that that is true. There is increasing evidence that that was leaked by intention. I don't know whether it was.

Kahl: Probably by the number two guy. Because the number one guy is probably going to get killed.

Milani: That's one theory. That really is one theory.

Rabinowitz: The HR is already on it.

Milani: That they leaked his name because that would put him as the number one target. The other theory is that they're trying to preempt everyone else's discussion, essentially make him the designated successor. And I think the more credible story is that there is resistance to him.

The meeting hasn't concluded. And it isn't even clear whether they will decide on one successor. So you have essentially a military right now in Iran that is fighting that doesn't have a commander-in-chief.

At the same time, you have a military that claim are winning this war hands down. If you read the Iranian media, you will think that Orwell missed a boat on how you can concoct a reality that is completely irrelevant to intellectual reality, mental reality.

According to Iran's narrative, they have completely weakened the assault. They have defeated the U.S. plan that was to decapitate the regime and have it fall immediately. They are now—again I'm verbatim quoting—that the U.S. is now begging, and Israel is begging, Iran to allow for a negotiated settlement to end this. In other words, they have gone to the same playbook that they did at the end of the 12 Day War. According to the Iranian regime, they won that war as well. And they ended it at the behest of the United States and at the behest of Israel, who deplored Iran to end because they realized Iran is not about to fall and it's stronger than it was.

The economy is, I think, absolutely on the verge of collapse. There are credible reports from international organizations that the banking system is unable to sustain itself for long. If you go to an ATM in Iran today, you can't get more than $10 of your own money. Iranian currency is now increased to 170,000 to $1.00. To give you a contextual point of comparison baseline: in 1979 you had 7 tomans you would get a dollar. You now need 170,000 tomans to get a dollar. And even that you can only get an equivalent of $10.00 per day.

When the news of Khamenei’s death was announced, there was really a remarkable exhibition of joy in the streets. It wasn't a propaganda. It wasn't the diaspora. I have contacts inside Iran. And it was just truly remarkable. It shows the distance between the regime and the people. So you haven't isolated the regime. I think you have a weakened regime. And the only alternative that it sees is to disrupt international trade, increase the price of oil, not even necessarily inflict damage to the U.S. military.

There was a theory they had that said the Americans can't stand casualties. If we kill a few of them, they will have to change. They will end [this]. They are not here to stay. We are planning for the long haul; the U.S. is planning for the short haul, we will win this war. That's their public position. But clearly what they're trying to do, in my view, is increase the economic cost, make everyone else pressure the U.S. and Israel to end.

My sense has been for the last two days that from the second day they were trying to find someone to mediate a negotiated ceasefire. There are some indications today in the New York Times that they did actually almost immediately after the death of Khamenei try to negotiate

My guess is that they're trying to make these encroachments and these rather—in my view—stupid attacks on Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Qatar, even Turkey. These were countries that if there is anyone who would be siding with them in this war, they would be these four countries.

China has been rather silent. Russia has been equally rather silent. And they have now managed to put those on the other side.

So,I think people are in a moment of suspended disbelief. Markets are virtually closed. Shops virtually don't open unless they have food stuff that they sell. Everybody thinks holding on to what you have is more secure than selling it, because you won't be able to buy anything to resupply your store.

Goldgeier: Thanks for that opening. Ori, I'll turn to you next, Give us a sense of Israeli objectives, support within Israel for this, how this is playing out within Israel in terms of the objectives that Israel has sought and whether they are thinking that they're achieving what they set out to do.

Rabinowitz: First of all, as opposed to the U.S. and the U.S. public, the Israeli public is predominantly supportive of the war. It's portrayed as a move which will likely remove an existential threat.

The Iranian decision to launch a combined ballistic and drone missile strike in April 2024, an operation that the Iranians titled True Promise One, was the first time that Iran directly attacked Israel, not through its proxies. And it showed the Israelis that Iran is willing to attack Israel face on. It caused the Israelis to upgrade the threat assessment and the perception of threat which Iran emanates.

So, very different to the U.S. prism. Within Israel there's also, of course, the political debate. We're now in an election year. The original date for the election is slated for around September. Could be either September or October.

Usually speaking, not during a war, Israeli governments tend to be toppled in the last year because it's a coalition system and the junior coalition parties have an incentive to topple the government and show their voters that they were willing to stick up for whatever it was that they believed in. This is regardless of the current war and the current political situation. And it's highly likely that we'll see something similar developing now.

It's also increasingly likely that Netanyahu will maneuver to have an election in June, because what we learned following the June war was that the bump that he saw after the June war was actually rather short-lived. The Israeli public have a short memory. If waits until October, he might not reap any political dividend.

The political dividend, of course, will only be on the table if he manages to convince the public that the goals were achieved.

If it's okay, I'm going to talk about the three war scenarios and then maybe we can draw on that. I think that we can generally foresee three different war-ending scenarios. This is true to both the U.S. and Israel and just general observers.

First of all, the worst outcome—at least in Israel's perspective, but probably also for the U.S.—is that the regime somehow survives either with the Mujtaba or any other kind of more radically aligned regime. It could be one leader, it could be a triumvirate of leaders. We don't know the exact formalities of that. But the biggest challenge here is the following: what happens if the radical version of the regime ends up staying in power, and they decide to go nuclear because they decide that just having a nuclear latent capacity isn't enough?

So, just to underline and stress: Khamenei, the supreme leader, was an awful person and I think personally that the world is better off without him. And he did bring Iran to the threshold of nuclear capabilities. But he was also adamant. He never gave, as far as we know, the political directive to go nuclear and to cross the threshold.

What happens if the calculus changes? If we inherit a more radical, or just a regime that's just as radical? So that would be the worst outcome and a complete failure.

The second scenario is that the regime undergoes some sort of an internal change. Other internal factions, probably within the guards and not necessarily from the clerical establishment, they seize power.

And under such a scenario, can foresee a situation where that specific faction is a faction that the U.S. and perhaps Israel can live with because it's not a faction that's as radical, that's as determined to spread violence in the Middle East.

Just as a form of comparison: there are regimes—radical to a degree, but not as radical—there are regimes in the Middle East that the U.S. can live with. If you think about the al-Sharaa regime in Syria. Al-Sharaa, formerly known as Jolani, is a former jihadist. He took control of the government. He implemented certain policies. And he's someone that the U.S. can live with. To a different degree, the same goes to General el-Sisi in Egypt. There are leaders that are not democratic leaders in the Middle East that the U.S. can live with. So will we see the ascension of someone like that in the Iranian context?

I'll give you one interesting quote from a reporter called Nadav Eyal. He's an important Israeli political analyst. He interviewed Israeli sources on that. And this is what they told him: “The chances of finding a George Washington who will liberate Iran and lead it to democracy are small. The more plausible scenario is a Gorbachev scenario. Someone who attempts to reform the system and ends up bringing it down.”

As to what we mentioned here before, that Israel reportedly struck the building where the assembly of experts were meeting to vote—either vote or not vote on Mojtaba. He was either elected or not elected. They also went on the record giving the following quote that the site was targeted purposefully, but they weren't attempting to kill the people that were there. Assuming this is correct—I'm not telling you it's correct. I'm quoting a source. I can't verify it independently.

Maybe they bombed the parking lot, maybe they dropped the bomb next to them. They wanted to signal that these people were vulnerable, not necessarily to take them out. And again, this plays into a scenario where you want to increase factionalism within the regime. Again, I don't have a way to confirm this.

And lastly, of course, there's the idea that the regime would completely collapse. I don't know how likely this is. But I think what's important to understand here is that the comparison to 20th century-style aerial bombing campaigns is wrong. We're not talking about a 20th century-style aerial bombing campaign where you just bombed them from the air and you hope that the regime collapses. We already know that it's highly likely that there are covert ground-based operations  coming along. We don't have verifiable sources, but there are certain indications if you're an intelligence analyst and you follow reports from the ground, there are certain flags which basically tell you that it's likely that covert ground-based operations are taking place.

There are also reported operations. We already know, and there are reports and leaks that Israel has been bombing the border between Iran and Iraq. And there has been a phone conversation that Trump held with leaders of Kurdish factions that are willing to go into Iran and some reports maintain that they will go into Iran in the coming two days.

So this isn't going to be a 20th century style-aerial bombing campaign that's purely an aerial bombing campaign. So it could have unforeseen consequences like the collapse of the regime.

So, I'll end here.

Goldgeier: All right, Colin.

Kahl: So first of all, thanks to all of you for coming together on short notice. And as FSI director, I'm just humbled by the degree of expertise we can marshal on short notice to bring scholarly rigor to contemporary policy issues. And I think that's actually one of the things that makes FSI so special.

How many of you have heard of the term the fog of war? The fog of war is real. And I think we all have to be humble that none of us have complete understanding about what's going on. And I think that's an important caveat to say right at the beginning.

But I think in the fog of the Iran War, two things are actually kind of unquestionably true.

The first thing that no one can question is the prowess of the American and Israeli militaries. They are doing things that no militaries in the history of the world have been capable of doing. They are engaged in a stunning series of strikes to degrade the IRGC command and control and capabilities, to go after Iran's missile arsenal, to go after their missile launchers, to go after their weapons stockpiles, to go after their military production locations, to sink their navy. From a kind of tactical and operational sense, it is extraordinarily impressive.

Okay, so no one can question that. It is objectively true and apparent. That's thing one.

Thing two is no one can question the nature of the Iranian regime. This is an Iranian regime that has killed  hundreds of  Americans. It's an Iranian regime that has terrorized its neighbors for decades. It's an Iranian regime that has brutalized its domestic opposition. It's an Iranian regime that has sought nuclear capabilities that could destabilize the region and threaten American interests. These are objectively true facts.

But none of that means that there aren't huge questions about this war. And they're actually, frankly, questions that neither the American or the Israeli leadership have been forthright in answering. So that's what I really want to focus most of my remarks around.

I think there are huge questions, especially about how this war will end and ultimately what the strategic implications of that end state will be, particularly for American national interests.

So the question of how long the war goes on, I think, will fundamentally be determined by two dynamics. The first dynamic is military.

Iran's strategy, such as it is, is to expand the war horizontally and temporally. That is to cause as much pain to as many countries as possible for as long as possible to militarily and politically exhaust the countries fighting them.

So they are targeting U.S. bases throughout the region. They're attacking American diplomatic outposts. They're attacking commercial centers throughout the region, energy infrastructure, shipping across the region. They're hitting targets in the Gulf and in the Levant. They've hit targets in Kuwait, Bahrain, UAE, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Israel. That is a very horizontal campaign. The goal ultimately, in my belief, is to exhaust the U.S. military and regional states, ultimately having the regime survive on war termination terms that allow them to fight another day.

Here, Iran's strategy depends in part on their ability to continue widening the conflict, for example, through the use of proxies: Lebanese Hezbollah, the Houthis in Yemen, Iraqi Shia militia. But most importantly, it depends on this hide-and-seek between Iran's ability to launch especially short-range ballistic missiles and drones, and the ability of the U.S. military and the Israeli military to target those drones and missiles before they get off the ground.

I think actually the campaign has made dramatic success integrating the medium-range ballistic missiles, especially the launchers that can attack Israel. Good news. But those are not the same missiles and launchers that can rain down on  countries in the Gulf and U.S. bases and facilities in the Gulf. Those are different launchers. There's much more plentiful ballistic missiles and they basically have an inexhaustible supply of short-range one-way attack drones.

These Shahed drones, they only cost about $35,000 apiece. We are shooting them down with $2 million missiles. That is an exchange that Iran will take any part of the day. So there is now a game of hide-and-seek. I don't mean “a game” to be a flip way. Literally the war is being paced to the ability of Iran to continue to move its forces around and deal damage to the region, especially in the Gulf, and the ability of the U.S. military and the Israeli military to go after those targets. That's the military dynamic, and that will determine which side is essentially exhausted first.

The second though is a political dynamic, namely the degree to which political pressure grows on President Trump to declare victory.

If he wanted to declare victory today, he could do it. If the goal is simply to massively degrade the Iranian regime's power projection capabilities, which is what the Pentagon has asserted, we're probably pretty close to that  already. We know that there are debates in Congress about war powers. That is putting some pressure. We know that there's grumbling in the MAGA base that an “America First” president keeps intervening in these foreign wars.

MAGA originated in part out of a sense of forever wars in the Middle East and exhaustion with that. That's become a political problem for the president's base. And we know that the one thing the president has actually responded to are signals from the market. And oil prices, gas prices, and the stock market are extraordinarily turbulent at this point. So political pressure is going to grow at home to wrap this thing up.

The cross current of that is actually international pressure, where I think this issue is complicated. First, the Israeli position is not going to be complicated. They were going to want the United States to fight as long as it takes to destroy this regime. That is the goal of the Israeli political leadership. It is supported by the Israeli people, to Ori's point.

The more complicated international political equation is probably in the Gulf, where in the near term they're outraged, right? The Emiratis have suffered hundreds of ballistic missile attacks and hundreds of drone attacks. Other Gulf countries have been hit. Iran might have believed that that was going to cow them into submission right away. It has not had that effect.

There's actually a chance that the UAE and Saudi could engage in defensive strikes inside Iran. But right now they are exhausting their supply of air defense interceptors. That is especially true, I think, in the UAE. But it will be true across the region. And that is exactly Iran's goal. And there will be a point at which the countries in the Gulf do not want their ports and their infrastructure and their airports and their hotels bombed. And they will call for a timeout.

So, I think political pressure in the near term is not so high, but in the medium term, meaning in weeks, will grow as the Gulf gets tired. And I think the military exhaustion on the U.S. side will also play into this dynamic as the Pentagon warns that our own interceptor arsenals will be depleted. I'll come back to that.

So that's the dynamics I'm looking for in terms of how long the war lasts.

But I think there are even bigger strategic questions here. It's a lot easier to start wars than end them. It's a lot easier to achieve tactical victories than strategic ones. And so I think we should all be on the lookout as analysts on a few things.

First of all, what is the political end state that the Trump administration is seeking in Iran? Is it regime change? They've suggested that it is at times, and at other times that it's not. Is it behavior change? Is it simply to leave whatever regime in place so badly degraded so that it can't threaten its neighbors for some interval of time? That's certainly how the Pentagon has described its objectives.

To say the least, the Trump administration has been highly inconsistent and they have not been forthright with the American people. And separate it apart from whether you think Congress should get involved or not, it is the obligation of the President of United States to explain to the American people why he has authorized our men and women being put in harm's way at the scale that's happening in Iran. And it is crazy that that has not happened.

The second and related question: is how much divergence ultimately is there between the US end state and the Israeli end state? So Israel clearly favors regime change, but I also think basically that Plan B for Israel is simply Iranian domestic chaos. That is that Iran is so internally divided and consumed that it doesn't threaten Israel. By the way, this was basically Israel's posture for most of the Syrian civil war, which is to contain the direct threats to Israel, but basically let everybody else inside Syria kill each other. The jihadists, Hezbollah, the regime, the Russians, everybody. They could all kill each other, Israel would deal with the weapons that threaten them from Syria, and other than that, it was fine for Syria to be in a civil war.

I think they could have a similar perspective towards Iran if you don't get a kind of managed transition or regime change. As we said, the Trump administration has been all over the place on regime change. They've also been all over the place on whether they actually support Israel's Plan B, which is just domestic chaos. To Ori's point, there are credible reports that not only is Israel bombing the guard posts on the border between Northern Iraq and Iran, but the United States is working covertly and maybe overtly to agitate Kurdish forces in northern Iraq to infiltrate Iran and threaten the regime.

Now, maybe that is being done largely for coercive reasons, or maybe it's to stir up a civil war inside of Iran. And I'm old enough to have been a U.S. official during the wars in Iraq, Syria, and Libya to suggest that once a country starts down that road, all hell can break loose. And Iran is not a small country, okay? Geographically, it is the size of Iraq and Afghanistan put together, and it's 90 million people. It's the heart of Eurasia. An Iran that collapses into a violent civil war will convulse the world.  So we should just keep that in mind. So that's the second question I have.

The third is, will the Iranian people rise up? You know, Trump basically says the cavalry is on the way, but he said, stay in your home so you don't get killed, but the second the bombing happens, come out on the streets. Will they? And if they do, and the regime brutally cracks down again, what will the United States do?

Because, of course, this entire thing got started because Trump said you can't slaughter your own people and that's what they did by the thousands, maybe the tens of thousands. It took us several weeks for the U.S. military to show up en masse. They then launched. So if the Iranian people come out and they start getting gunned down, does that drag the U.S. military back in? Is there a mission creep dynamic here? If it does, then the campaign's going go on. If it doesn't, and that's what happened during the Arab Spring?

Or, do we abandon the protesters in the streets and let them be slaughtered, which is essentially what happened to the Kurds in Iraq after the Gulf War, right? Which is a blow to U.S. credibility. So one pathway to mission creep is if the people do come out into the streets and then it does become an effort to back whatever they're doing to change the regime or abandon them and face the credibility consequences from that. So that's the third question.

The fourth question is what is the implication for nuclear proliferation? Jim, to your point about like first they said it was obliterated and then they said it's two weeks. Both are true in the following respect. What wasn't obliterated are the 400 kilograms of 60 percent highly enriched uranium that were probably in tunnels under Isfahan or somewhere else that weren't destroyed last summer.

400 kilograms of 60 percent HEU is enough for 10 or 11 nuclear bombs—not the bombs themselves but the fissile material, the explosive material for the bombs, if further enriched to 90 percent. They could do that in a couple of weeks, hence the two weeks. Were they about to do that? I have no idea. I'm not privy to the intelligence, but there's no indication from reporting that they were. And believe me, if there were indications, both the Americans and the Israelis would be putting it out there.

But the question then becomes, well, if you don't get a hold of that material and the regime survives, what are the implications for nuclear proliferation in Iran? Because 400 kilograms of HEU doesn't take that many IR-6 centrifuges in a warehouse somewhere to spin up the explosive material for a nuclear weapon. And if I'm the regime, my missiles weren't enough to deter, my drones weren't enough to deter, my threshold nuclear capability wasn't enough to deter, I might draw the conclusion that only a nuclear bomb could deter this from happening again. So will that be the future?

The next question I would ask—and I'm sorry for going on so long, but I'm almost done—will a dramatically weakened Iran, which I think is inevitable . . . Iran will emerge from this dramatically weakened under every set of circumstances. Will a dramatically weakened Iran liberate the United States from the Middle East or pin us down in the Middle East? Proponents of the war, especially the America Firsters, are saying, look, we never get to be out of the Middle East as long as this regime is there. We have to swat the regime back because that liberates us to focus on, take your pick: the Western Hemisphere, the Indo-Pacific, whatever the Trump administration says they care about the most.

The challenge with that is that's historically never the way it's worked in the Middle East. In the aftermath of this, there will be enormous pressure from our own military command to keep forces in the region to contain the aftermath. There could be mission creep, which pins us down. And all of the Gulf states who now have seen Americans flow in and seen their own defenses degraded by this war, will be begging us to stay and will be telling us if we pull a single American out of the Middle East, we're abandoning them.

So the pressure to keep the United States trapped in the Middle East after we spent so much time un-entrapping ourselves from the Middle East will be profound, and that will have consequences on our ability to do anything else.

There was a reason why it took a few weeks for the U.S. military to show up in the Middle East. Not because we don't have the most powerful military in the world, but because they were busy in the Caribbean. So they had to be relocated across the world to do what they've done. And if they're pinned down in the Middle East, it means they're not available for contingencies in Europe or in Northeast Asia or in Southeast Asia or in the hemisphere.

A related question is: what does this mean for post-war U.S. strategic exhaustion? We're going to win this tactically and operationally. That's not even a close fight. It will be highly imbalanced. But I was at the Pentagon overseeing our war planning for all of these things. We basically get to fight one protracted war. And once we do, it's going to be a couple of years before you are ready to fight another one.

And that's why they are so desperate to recapitalize the munitions, because we are expending a lot of long range precision munitions and a lot of air interceptors. And a lot of these weapon systems are exactly the weapon systems you need for a contingency in North Korea, across the Taiwan Strait, in the Baltics.

And so as a consequence, the paradox is that this war is likely to be operationally a demonstration of amazing American military power. And maybe weaker countries around the world will be like, “Woah, woah, we don't want that to happen to us. Like, wow, what they did to Iran, what they did to Maduro, like no way do we want any piece of this.”

But if you're in Moscow and Beijing, you count things. And you know that for the next two or three years, the United States' cupboard is going to be bare. And so what does that mean for our ability to deter what they do in the Baltics? Across the Taiwan Strait?

And my own intuition is that the Trump administration has basically been punching down at weak actors and not punching up at major powers, and that Trump is keen to accommodate Putin and Xi. And that actually this will encourage him to do that for the next two or three years because frankly, a more confrontational posture will not be viable.

And the last point I will just make is what are the implications for the international order? Whatever one thinks of the war, it does not fit traditional understandings of international law. That's true in Iran. It's true in Venezuela. Basically what the United States says, we can do things unilaterally. We didn't even try to build a broad coalition. Even George W. Bush built a coalition of the willing before the invasion of Iraq. We didn't do any of that. We didn't appeal to international norms. We didn't appeal to international law. We didn't build an international coalition. We said that the United States can unilaterally decide to decapitate foreign regimes. We did it in Venezuela. We did it again in Iran.

And if you're in Moscow or Beijing, you will draw the conclusion that the United States has no moral, legal, or ethical leg to stand on in opposing you from doing the same thing. Will that change Putin or Xi Jinping's inclination to do something in the Baltics or in Taiwan? No, it won't. But will it make it harder for a future American administration to rally the world to deter or defeat that aggression? 100%. And so from an international order perspective, that's a problem.

I don't want to pretend any of these things are easy. They're not. Nobody should believe that Iran is a good actor. They're not. But these are the strategic questions that our leaders owe us answers to. And I have not heard an answer to a single one of them.

Goldgeier: Colin, I want to follow up on two issues, one you mentioned and one you didn't but that have been in the news a lot recently.

So one is the stockpile question, how much we actually have in order to fight a war. And people have made all sorts of accusations that we've sent too much to Ukraine and that leaves us short, or we need more in the Indo-Pacific that we don't have. And here we are fighting this major war against Iran.

You mentioned the challenge it poses for other contingencies elsewhere in the next two to three years. But what about how long we can sustain this war with what we have? That's one question.

And then the second is, there's been a lot in the news recently about Anthropic and Claude. And before the war started, it was about how the U.S. government was going to go after Anthropic because they didn't want Claude used in certain ways, especially regarding mass surveillance of Americans.

But the stories in the paper the last couple of days have been about the use of Claude for targeting and the ways in which this has really enabled the United States to fight this war in a way that it wouldn't have been able to previously. And just get your thoughts on the role of Claude.

Kahl: Okay, big questions. On the stockpile  and the “How long?” question. Thirty seconds of background: so there was a lot of underinvestment in the defense industrial base in the post-Cold War period. And to the degree that we were investing, we were investing in platforms, not munitions. And so when the Ukraine war burst out and we started to send stockpiles to Ukraine, it became increasingly evident that if we sent too much of anything, it would start to imperil our ability to defend our own interests in the context of certain contingencies.

This was a critique, in fact, as you mentioned, Jim, of those who said we provided Ukraine too much, including many who currently sit in the administration. Of course, there are also people in the administration that claim we didn't provide enough.

The Biden administration invested billions in recapitalizing the defense industrial base. The Trump administration wisely is doing the same. The challenge is that it just it's not about money. It's not how much money you spend. It doesn't happen overnight. You can't build factories, you can't hire the workers, you have subcontractor issues.

And just as an example of the scale: we currently, by shot doctrine, shoot two to three Patriot interceptors at every Iranian missile. The Iranians have shot hundreds of missiles. Do the math. We only produce 600 Patriot interceptors a year. So you're gonna burn through that stuff pretty fast.

CENTCOM has made a big deal of the fact that the Army is now using this new long-range precision strike missile called the PRISM. That was designed for contingencies in places like the Korean Peninsula and the Taiwan Strait. So everything we are shooting off in the Middle East is something that's not available in the near term for any other contingency.

How long can it go? Well, it depends on how much risk the president is willing to take on our ability to do anything else. So could it go for weeks? Certainly. Could it go for months? Probably. The longer it goes, does it cause trade-offs with our ability to do anything else anywhere else? Yeah.

And I'll tell you that the Russians and the Chinese are really good at counting things. And they will know exactly how long we can fight them. And the one thing is for sure, we can fight them less ably after this war than when the war started. It's not an argument for why the war is a bad idea, but it is an argument that that strategic trade-off is real, that you get to fight the one big war and was this war in the context of this regime at this moment what you wanted to expand American power on, separate and apart from everything else?

One thing I'm confident of is the lesson they are not drawing in Moscow and Beijing is, “This could happen to you.”

What they are drawing is because this is happening to Iran, it's actually less likely it's going to happen to you anytime soon. And then the question is, what do they do about that? I don't think it means that either one of those countries is likely to start a new war, actually. I think what it means is they're going to pursue their current objectives more aggressively with less fear that the United States will put pressure on them, and more sense that they will be accommodated.

So in Ukraine, it will mean they're more confident the United States will not send a bunch of weapons to Ukraine. In Taiwan, it could mean the same thing, or I think Xi Jinping basically wants to achieve his preferred outcome in Taiwan peacefully but coercively. And I think this will strengthen his hand in negotiations with Trump this year, especially as they meet in Beijing in April for their first summit and probably a few more times this year to try to reach some “Big, Beautiful Trade Bill.” I've always believed that Trump was likely to go soft on some combination of technology and Taiwan. And I think Beijing will calculate this gives them a stronger hand to play. So I don't think it's new aggression. I think it's their current path, but they'll see it as easier to pursue. We'll see.

Okay, Claude. As you've probably read in the news, Anthropic’s frontier model, Claude, is one of the two or three best frontier AI models in the world, alongside the offerings from OpenAI and Gemini and Google DeepMind. But the thing that separates Claude is that Anthropic was the first company to actually put its models into classified computing clusters, and Claude is also integrated, reportedly, into the Maven Smart System.

For those of you who follow Silicon Valley soap opera around national security issues, you'll recall back in 2018, Google had a Maven, the Maven contract—this was about using AI for targeting, a target identification on drones and things. There was a revolt by Google engineers, Google dropped the contract, Palantir picked it up. Anthropic is a partner with Palantir. Now Palantir integrates Anthropic's models into the Maven Smart System.

The Maven Smart System is being used in Iran. It was previously used to help the Ukrainians. All of this has been publicly reported. This is not autonomous killer robots. These are AI decision support tools. Basically, it means fusing all classified intelligence: think signals intelligence, emissions from radios, radar, satellite imagery, full motion video, social media that's geo-located, fusing all of that data at a scale and speed that human analysts would not be able to do to generate points of interest that are turned into targets.

And so basically, it speeds up the targeting process. By the way, Israel uses similar systems called Gospel and Lavender to accelerate targeting in places like Gaza and Lebanon. Maybe Ori can talk more about that.

But the point being that AI's role in warfare is already here. It is here in the Middle East. It is here in Ukraine. My suspicion is you're seeing reports about Claude’s use in Iran because people at Anthropic are trying to remind people of the costs of trying to disentangle Anthropic's tools in terms of the costs on ongoing operations. And I would be doing the same thing.

But it is a reminder that a paradox of Secretary Hegseth's approach on AI is that he released a memo in January saying we need to go at warp speed on AI. There are even posters in the Pentagon that are AI-generated of him pointing at people saying, “Use AI.” And yet in the feud with Anthropic, they're going to spend the next 6 to 18 months taking steps backwards to rip Anthropic out of their operational architectures to replace it with something else, which is not a step forward. It strikes me as a step backwards, or at least sideways.

Goldgeier: Thank you. Abbas, the issue came up, this question about regime change versus behavior change. What are your expectations regarding either of those two things? And if you could also say a little bit about the Kurds in this whole unfolding within Iran, that would be very helpful. I'm going to ask Ori to also comment on the Kurds as well. But this regime change versus behavior change first.

Milani: I think what can in the short term or midterm be expected is more  change of behavior rather than a regime change. There isn't the kind of boots on the ground, whether in terms of the opposition  or in terms of Israel or the U.S., to dislodge this regime.

But the regime, in my view, is desperate enough that it realizes that unless they make these kinds of changes of behavior, they won't survive. I believe that even if Mojtaba comes, Mojtaba —even with the IRGC—have no choice but to recalibrate with the people, recalibrate with the international community.

That's why when they were pitching Mojtaba, there's two pitches about him. One is that he's intimately connected with the IRGC. He is the central founder of the IRGC intelligence, that he is very deep into the economic shenanigans. But they also dropped hints that he is Iran's MBS, that the only person that can do for Iran what MBS did in Saudi Arabia is him, because he has the clout, he has the connection, he has the IRGC. So they have created both of these, and this is before this crisis.

To me, the fact that they launched this PR campaign for him indicates they know themselves that the status quo is untenable, that they need to restructure, rethink, recalibrate with the people.

And to me the idea that arming the Kurds was a very foolish thing to say and a very foolish thing to do. I think it will convince some Iranian people that what the regime has been saying is all along is true. Because what the regime has been saying is that this is not about the nuclear program, this is not about our behavior. Israel and the United States and primarily Israel want to destroy Iran, they want to dismantle Iran.

They point to some article twenty years ago that said Iran needs to be weakened. That this is part of some master plan. To me, it was was a very foolhardy.

There are people within the regime that have clearly, unambiguously, to different degrees, been saying for the last 10 years—if anybody was paying attention—that the status quo can't work. Some of them are in prison right now. Tajzadeh, example. Qadianii, for example. These people have been calling out Khamenei by name, saying you are the source of the problem, and unless you change, unless we remove you, we can’t save our own.

And in recent months, Rouhani joined them. Zarif joined. These are people who are part of the regime. Rouhani, in all but name, systematically pointed to Khamenei in saying that you have been wrong on every strategic decision. In one conversation, Rouhani said, we were in a meeting with Khamenei, and we said, Israel and the United States might attack us.

And commanders of the IRGC said, absolutely not. They won't dare. We have 200,000 missiles. We will destroy Israel the first week. And said to Khamenei, that these are stupid imaginations. They can hit us. And Khamenei sided with those. So there is that tendency. There is that desire within the regime to recalibrate, whether there will be anything left of them to do this.

One last point about the bomb, your question about the bomb and the strength of FSI. Sig Hecker, one of the most eminent scholars of  nuclear science, the head of Los Alamos, he and I wrote two articles about Iran's enrichment program, one twelve years ago and one about five months ago.

And in that one, we said, the only thing that is left of your enrichment capacity, virtually, is this 460. With this, you can make a few dirty bombs. Give it up and make a compromise with the international community that will allow Iran and you, the regime, to survive.

Absolutely, they did the opposite and began to threaten that they're going to use this and that they have the capacity to withstand all of these pressures, that there will not be another war. Khamenei famously said, there will not be war, there will not be negotiation. There has been war, there has been negotiations. And many people within the regime are basically saying that maybe a change of behavior.

Again, I can't believe that the regime change can come from outside. I was very much opposed to the idea of trying to bring regime change through attack. I thought the U.S. should help the Iranian people, not kinetically, not attacking Iran, [but by] making the battle between the Iranians and this brutal regime more equitable by giving them satellite connection, by the kinds of non-interventionist things that I think would have enabled a very viable democratic movement to bring about the change that hopefully brings peace to the Middle East.

Goldgeier: Thank you. And for Ori, what should we be looking for as we think about the Israeli objectives versus the U.S. objectives? The convergence, the divergence? How are you looking at this? And also, if you have anything you want to add on the Kurds,

Rabinowitz: I'll string together a few thoughts. So, with the Kurds, I think that there are two primary objectives. I'm not convinced that just starting a civil war is a defined objective. I think that it's more likely that the Israelis want to see a non-hostile faction take cover, but I'm basing this based on the statements. And again, fog of war, maybe these statements are just not being made. I can only use what's out there.

I think that the idea is to first of all stretch Iranian security forces and weaken them, to pave the way for those unnamed opposition forces or the factions that are more amenable to collaborate with the U.S. and Israel, and to encourage other ethnic minorities like the Baluchis and the Azeris and maybe therefore encourage the Iranians to rise up.

They haven't really given indications, the Israelis or the Americans, that they think it's now time to go tomorrow because we're still in the air. I think this is just day four, right? I mean, it looks like a hundred years from my perspective, but I think they're still kind of preparing the ground. But it's likely that we'll start seeing more . . .

Kahl: It's day five. We're like, 20% further ahead than what you . . .

Rabinowitz: Wow, yeah. Sleep deprivation will do that to a person. So just to follow up, to give you some numbers to elaborate on what Colin said. We have relatively good numbers with the UAE. I haven't been able to compile the assessments on Israel. Everything is based on open source and different analytical reports. And there's an analyst called Fabian Hoffman. He does a terrific job, and he compiled the numbers for the UAE.

In the first two days, we saw 165 ballistic missiles that were launched from Iran to the UAE, and in the following days we saw 9, 12, and 3. So these are five days, not four days. So I lost a day. So, day five of the war.

So, we saw a decline in the launches. We also saw a decline with the drones. And exactly like Colin said, if you run the numbers of how many Patriots you need to intercept these missiles, the analysts think that about 410 interceptors were probably required, which roughly amounts to anywhere between 20 to 40% of what the UAE will assess that they have in their stockpile. So you can imagine that if you're a UAE decision maker, this is going to make you rather stressed about how many interceptors you're going to need in the coming days.

So everything really depends on the success of the hunting missions that we now see in Iran.

The numbers are declining. Are they declining fast enough? We'll know in the coming days. I should mention that it looks like the numbers with Israel are probably somewhere aligned with this thing, but I don't have the actual numbers. But we did see a decrease, and we also saw a decrease in the intensity of the salvo. So when I say salvo, I don't mean a single machine that's firing repeatedly. We're talking about a bunch of launchers kind of shooting together as a pack. Think about the wolfpack submarine style from World War II. They're coming together and they each have one missile and they launch it together.

During the 12 Day War, saw the salvos shooting 40, 50 missiles together. Now we see them increasingly in lower numbers. This indicates a lot of disruption to Iranian capability to coordinate the launchers shooting together. But they're still launching, but again, in smaller numbers.

Now I want to talk a little bit about the Israeli-U.S. possible divergence. So just to frame this, because the hunt for the launchers is now the primary objective, it's definitely what the U.S. and Israel are most interested in. We didn't see a lot of Iranian nuclear facilities being hit. We saw some, and again, fog of war. I'm relying on open source reports.

There are reports that Natanz was hit. There are reports that Isfahan was hit, [but] we don't know which facilities inside Isfahan. Are we talking about the tunnels with more than 400 kilos of enriched uranium, the entrance to the tunnels? We don't know yet.

But—and here's a very interesting nugget from yesterday evening—the IDF reported that one of the sites that they hit was a secret site, not previously reported, where the Iranian weapons group was working on a trigger mechanism for the nuclear bomb.

Again, I can't verify this independently. This is something that was stated and it ties on to recent reports, again, just from an hour before we convened here, that the Israelis have intelligence that the Iranian rebuilding effort was much more intense following the 12 Day War. That specific report mentioned the missile program. I'm assuming it also touches on the nuclear issue.

The U.S.-Iranian talks about the nuclear program were held last week. It looks like a millennia ago. They were held last week. Witkoff and Kushner gave for the record briefing and off the record briefing as administration officials. And apparently they were a bit shocked because what they said in all these briefings is that the Iranians basically were taunting the fact that they still have their 460 kilos of enriched uranium and they can do whatever they want with it.

And another thing that they were stressing is their ability to produce advanced centrifuges. These advanced centrifuges are called IR-6. The number itself doesn't matter. The idea is that they were insisting on their ability to produce these machines. And I think this is something that really was significant in the decision-making process.

And here we come to the divergence. I think that the biggest possibility of divergence between Israeli and U.S. perception of the war would be if we do end up seeing a Mojtaba or another faction from within the guards taking over the regime and being convenient or malleable enough for Trump and the U.S. to work with foregoing any nuclear thing, perhaps foregoing most or all of the nuclear program, but not forgoing the ideology, the anti-Israel rhetoric, the support for destabilizing Israeli-Arab normalization, etc.

So imagine something that is somewhat similar to a Qatar actor, right? Qatar is an actor that the Trump administration is very at home with, but Qatar is an anti-Israel actor. So what do you get when you have an actor like that that the U.S. can live with but Israel isn't happy with? That's where you'll see the divergence.

Goldgeier: Okay, great. Thank you.

Milani: Let me give you a little history. Iran was the first Muslim country next to Turkey to de facto recognize the state of Israel. Iran had very close relations with Israel from 1950 to 1979.

Israel was a supporter of Iran's nuclear program, and there is evidence that Israel worked with South Africa to help Iran develop a bomb in 1975. But Iran was also systematically under the Shah, the defender of a two-state solution, demanding that Israel must give up the territories, and a democratic Iran that recognizes, contrary to what this regime has done for 47 years, that does not believe that the destruction of the state of Israel is Iran's top, or one of the top, strategic goals. That can bring peace in the Middle East, can help bring peace in the Middle East. It can't guarantee it.

You cannot, in my view, have peace in the Middle East without the recognition of the rights of Palestinians to a state. You're not going to have long-term peace. And the Abrahamic Accord, in my view, is de facto a reality on the ground. The Shah was the outlier with Turkey having diplomatic relations with Israel. Everybody in the Muslim Middle East is now craving to have that relationship. The problem is Palestine.

Rabinowitz: In opinion, Israel needs to work towards a two-state solution with the Palestinians. This is a minority opinion. I'm not representing the Israeli public here. I'm representing my own opinion as an Israeli and as a scholar of security studies in the Middle East. The only way to translate wartime achievement into sustainable political goals is to do something political with them.

I think one of the negative things that this specific current government has done in Israel was to squander away the opportunity to reach normalization with Saudi Arabia. Colin can talk more about this, but specifically in May 2024—this is still during the Biden administration—there was a relatively concrete offer on the table, but Netanyahu, due to various political considerations— they will tell you that they're altruistic and me, myself personally, as someone who doubts his motivations—I think they were politically motivated to maintain the integrity of the Israeli government. He insisted on maintaining a very right-wing political component of the government and that precluded any kind of progress in the Palestinian-Israeli path.

So that's a very simple answer, but I don't have an answer of how we get there, because again, I'm a minority. How do I convince more Israelis to agree with me? When the government calls for a snap election, which we now think will be in June, will they vote in political parties that share this? I don't know how to do this.

Kahl: First of all, I think we should acknowledge that there's no agreement on what peace even means in this context and what peace would be durable, sustainable. There's not agreement inside the United States administration. There's not an agreement between the United States and Israel on this question. So it's hard, right? So all I can speak to is what would I think winning the peace, like from my perspective, which is only as valuable as you value my opinion.

I think first it would be a peace that is an outcome where Iran is so weakened that it either changes its intention to threaten its neighbors, or for a meaningful period of time does not have the capability of doing that. I think in some ways that's the easiest objective here to achieve. Not easy, but the easiest objective to achieve because of the asymmetry and the military capabilities that are on display at the moment.

I think a second condition though, is a more integrated region that shares a sense of collective security and that is integrated across the Arab-Israeli divide. So think of it as an expansion of the Abraham Accords: more integration between Israel and moderate Arab states, looking after their defense and cooperating more with each other, not just on military issues, but intelligence and economic and energy and environment.

But a third is that it is a peace that doesn't require tens of thousands of Americans to be trapped in the desert for forever. That's not something the American people want. That's not something that is militarily wise or sustainable from the United States. And in a world of intense geopolitical competition, is strategic malpractice to keep Americans at scale trapped in the Middle East. So from a narrow U.S. interest standpoint, a stable peace is a peace that is sustainable without the United States having to do everything.

Goldgeier:  Well, we're going to have to leave it there. Thank you all so much for your insights. We really appreciate it. Thank you all for coming. Please join me in thanking the panel.

[END EVENT AUDIO]

Kahl: You’ve been listening to World Class from the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. If you like what you’re hearing, please leave us a review and be sure to subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts to stay up to date on what is happening around the world, and why.

Belarusian strongman Alexander Lukashenko’s role in ending the June 24 military mutiny in Russia undoubtedly scored him points with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Still, Lukashenko should worry about another aspect of his closeness to Putin and Russia.

Russian foreign policy expert Sergey Karaganov recently called, in essence, for Russia to launch a nuclear war against the West. Fortunately, it appears more sober minds prevail in Moscow. However, should Karaganov’s idea gain traction in the Kremlin, Lukashenko should understand that he has made Belarus a prime nuclear target. 

Karaganov, honorary chair of a Moscow think tank, wrote in mid-June that Russia needed to lower the threshold for use of nuclear weapons in order to break Western support for Ukraine. If the West did not back down, Karaganov opined that “we will have to hit [with nuclear weapons] a group of targets in a number of countries,” adding that, if Russia did not use “God’s weapon” for this, “not only may Russia perish, but most likely the whole of human civilization will end.”

Serious-minded analysts in Moscow quickly took issue with Karaganov’s argument. Asked about the possible use of tactical nuclear weapons as suggested by Karaganov, Putin said “I reject this. … First, we see no need to use it [a tactical nuclear strike]; and second, considering this, even as a possibility, factors into lowering the threshold for the use of such weapons.”

Over the past sixteen months since launching its massive invasion of Ukraine, the Kremlin has rattled the nuclear saber. But the Russian leadership appears to understand that actually using nuclear weapons would not change attitudes in Ukraine, which already regards this war as existential, and would lead to a harsh Western response. Moreover, such threats do not go down well with audiences that matter to Moscow, including in Beijing and New Delhi.

Nevertheless, on March 25, Putin announced that Russia would place tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus. They will remain under Russian control but could be turned over for use by the Belarusian military. On June 16, Putin noted that the first tactical warheads had arrived in Belarus, with deployment of the rest to be completed by the end of the year.

Given the large number of Russian tactical nuclear arms and their possible deployment in the Kaliningrad exclave, nuclear weapons in Belarus do not materially increase the threat to Ukraine or NATO. While NATO might not like it, it has a weak basis for criticizing Russia, as the United States maintains nuclear arms on the territory of NATO members for their possible use.

This new development should worry Lukashenko. His agreement to host Russian nuclear arms makes his country a more likely target were a conflict to erupt between NATO and Russia.

And he already had grounds for serious concern.

NATO policy during much of the Cold War envisaged the use of nuclear weapons, either in response to first use by the Soviet military or deliberate escalation if NATO defenses failed at the conventional level. That posed a question: which targets in what countries to strike? Some allies favored nuclear strikes against targets in the Soviet Union. Others thought that too provocative and escalatory and argued instead for striking non-Soviet Warsaw Pact allies — East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Bulgaria. Happily, NATO and the Soviet Union never ran the experiment.

If Russia were to use nuclear weapons now, a contemporary version of that debate within NATO could turn out badly for Minsk. All the former non-Soviet Warsaw Pact countries have joined NATO, and NATO members presumably would not favor nuclear attacks on their own territory. If the Russian military conducted a nuclear strike against NATO, the Kremlin certainly could not rule out the possibility of a NATO nuclear retaliatory strike against Russia itself, and that would weigh heavily on any Russian decision to use nuclear weapons in the first place. However, if striking Russian territory were deemed too incendiary, Lukashenko has offered up Belarus.

A war game in which I took part several years ago centered on a Russian invasion of the Baltic states. The Russian military used a single tactical nuclear weapon against U.S. Navy ships ferrying Marines across the Baltic Sea to help defend Latvia. The game participants favoring a nuclear response ruled out striking a target in Russia (too escalatory) and instead opted for a retaliatory nuclear attack on a Russian army brigade in — you guessed it — Belarus.

A Washington think tank organized that game. However, senior administration officials during the Obama administration in another war game came to a similar conclusion. In their game, Russia used a couple of tactical nuclear weapons. The players concluded there had to be a nuclear response, but striking Russia itself could be too provocative, so they used nuclear weapons against two military targets in Belarus.

This should be sobering for Lukashenko, who should pray that Karaganov’s bizarre idea has no real influence in Moscow. Lukashenko has quite likely ensured that, should Russia use tactical nuclear weapons, retaliatory ground zeros will be located in Belarus.

Find the original article at brookings.edu

Impacts on Russia, Ukraine, and Beyond

Michael McFaul

The implications of the 72-hour mutiny will last much longer and extend much further beyond Rostov and Moscow, says FSI Director and former U.S. ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul.

Speaking with Madeline Brand of KRCW, McFaul outlined the difficult situation Putin now finds himself in.

“This whole series of events has made Putin look a lot weaker than he looked three or four days ago. The very fact that the Wagner group exists is a sign of weakness. Putin needs them because he couldn’t rely on his armed forces.”

Elaborating further on Putin’s dilemma, McFaul says:

“As those mercenaries were getting closer to Moscow, Putin went on TV and sounded very macho, calling Prigozhin’s men traitors and promising to crush them, but then four hours later, he capitulates and starts to negotiate. And now he’s given another speech where it sounds like he’s pleading with these mercenaries to lay down their weapons and join the Russian forces. That clearly shows he hasn’t resolved this Wagner crisis yet.”

McFaul predicts that Putin’s remaining partners are also taking note of his fumbled reaction to the rebellion.

“​​If you’re Xi Jinping watching this, the big bet you made on Putin as a partner in opposing the West is looking really problematic right now.”

What Chinese officials fear most, McFaul explained to MSNBC’s Jonathn Capehart, is instability and dissolution, both internally and amongst their neighbors. Historically, the collapse of the Soviet Union was a catastrophic event for Chinese Communist Party officials, and a lesson the current leadership is loath to repeat.

McFaul asserts that, “The longer Putin’s war in Ukraine goes, the more probable it becomes that Russia becomes more unstable. The longer this war goes on, the more likely it is we could see something like this play out over and over again. So I would hope that Xi Jinping understands that putting pressure on Putin to end the war in Ukraine is the best way to prevent chaos on China's borders.”

There are also important lessons the United States and its allies need to consider when evaluating the kind of support they are willing to give Ukraine as the war wears on.

“Putin capitulated very fast, and I think that says a lot about how he’s going to fight in Ukraine and whether he needs an ‘off ramp’ like we’ve been saying. We’ve heard all of these arguments that if he’s backed into a corner he’ll never negotiate. Well, this weekend Putin was in a corner, and he didn't double down. He didn't escalate. He negotiated,” McFaul observes.

Continuing this thought on his Substack, McFaul emphasized that, “The lesson for the war in Ukraine is clear. Putin is more likely to negotiate and end his war if he is losing on the battlefield, not when there is a stalemate. Those who have argued that Ukraine must not attack Crimea for fear of triggering escalation must now reevaluate that hypothesis. The sooner Putin fears he is losing the war, the faster he will negotiate.”

Or, as McFaul writes in Journal on Democracy, “Anything that weakens Putin is good for Ukraine. It is as simple as that.”  

Fallout on Nuclear Security and Norms

Rose Gottemoeller

Throughout the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, there have been concerns about nuclear sabre rattling by Putin and Kremlin-backed propagandists. Writing in the Financial Times, Rose Gottemoeller, the Steven C. Házy Lecturer at CISAC and former Deputy Secretary of NATO offered this insight:

“The fixation with nuclear apocalypse seems to be the symptom of a wider anxiety that the west is bent on Russian dismemberment because of its aspirations in Ukraine. The Kremlin argues that it only wanted to resume its ancestral right to a Slavic heartland, but that the U.S. and NATO are seeking as punishment Russia’s full and complete destruction as a nation state.”

Gottemoeller has been quick to condemn Putin’s casual threats of nuclear use and clear in her recommendations to the U.S. administration and its allies to find constructive ways to keep nuclear arms talks open despite the war in Ukraine and setbacks like Russia’s suspension of its participation in the New START Treaty.

The Wagner takeover of Rostov-on-Don adds a new layer to the security concerns surrounding Russia’s nuclear posture. Looking at the evolution of Putin’s nuclear rhetoric over the last 18 months, Gottemoeller writes:

“Putin embraced nuclear weapons to keep the United States and its NATO allies off his back and out of his way as he pursued his adventure in Ukraine. It did not work out that way. The United States and NATO were not ready to fight inside Ukraine, but they were willing to do everything else to support Kyiv’s cause — economic, political, security and military assistance to ensure Russia’s defeat. Nuclear weapons failed Putin as a guarantee against external meddling.”

Turning to the events of the last week, Gottemoeller continues:

“We learned on June 24 that they are no help to him internally, either. He could not brandish nuclear weapons in the face of the Wagner Group uprising . . . Nuclear weapons are not the authoritarian’s silver bullet when his power is strained to the breaking point — far from it. In fact, they represent a consummate threat to national and global security if they should fall into the wrong hands in the course of domestic unrest.”

In light of Prigozhin’s mutiny, she urges global leaders to “focus on the problem, stop loose nuclear talk, and put new measures in place to protect, control and account for nuclear weapons and the fissile material that go into them.” 

The Unknown Unknowns of the Settlement

Steven Pifer

Major questions remain about the deal struck between Putin, Prigozhin, and Lukashenko. While Lukashenko has confirmed that the Wagner boss is now in Belarusian territory, it is unclear — and many feel, unlikely — that he will stay there in quiet retirement. 

Weighing in on Twitter, Steven Pifer, an affiliate at the Center for International Cooperation and Security and The Europe Center, and a former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine, acknowledged, “We likely do not know all carrots and/or sticks that were in play to lead to Prigozhin’s decision to end his mutiny . . . Something does not add up.”

Following up in Politico, Pifer added:

“The ‘settlement’ supposedly brokered by President Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus leaves Putin, who was invisible during the day except for a short morning TV broadcast, as damaged goods. It provided the impression that all was forgiven, likely because the Russian president feared the prospect of Prigozhin’s troops parading in Moscow — even if they lacked the numbers to take control of the capital. It is harder to understand Prigozhin. His demands went unmet, yet he ordered his troops back to garrison, accepted that they might join the Russian army that he detests, and meekly set off for Belarus. There clearly is more behind this ‘settlement’ than we understand.”

North Korea remains a puzzle to Americans. How did this country—one of the most isolated in the world and in the policy cross hairs of every U.S. administration during the past 30 years—progress from zero nuclear weapons in 2001 to a threatening arsenal of perhaps 50 such weapons in 2021?

Hinge Points brings readers literally inside the North Korean nuclear program, joining Siegfried Hecker to see what he saw and hear what he heard in his visits to North Korea from 2004 to 2010. Hecker goes beyond the technical details—described in plain English from his on-the-ground experience at the North's nuclear center at Yongbyon—to put the nuclear program exactly where it belongs, in the context of decades of fateful foreign policy decisions in Pyongyang and Washington.

Describing these decisions as "hinge points," he traces the consequences of opportunities missed by both sides.The result has been that successive U.S. administrations have been unable to prevent the North, with the weakest of hands, from becoming one of only three countries in the world that might target the United States with nuclear weapons. Hecker's unique ability to marry the technical with the diplomatic is well informed by his interactions with North Korean and U.S. officials over many years, while his years of working with Russian, Chinese, Indian, and Pakistani nuclear officials have given him an unmatched breadth of experience from which to view and interpret the thinking and perspective of the North Koreans.

For more information and purchasing please visit sup.org.

Visit the book website for an in-depth look at Dr. Siegfried S. Hecker time spent in North Korea.

This summer, the New York City Emergency Management department released a new public service announcement on nuclear preparedness, instructing New Yorkers about what to do during a nuclear attack. The 90-second video starts with a woman nonchalantly announcing the catastrophic news: “So there’s been a nuclear attack. Don’t ask me how or why, just know that the big one has hit.” Then the PSA video advises New Yorkers on what to do in case of a nuclear attack: Get inside, stay inside, and stay tuned to media and governmental updates.

But nuclear preparedness works better if you are not in the blast radius of a nuclear attack. Otherwise, there’s no going into your house and closing your doors because the house will be gone. Now imagine there have been hundreds of those “big ones.” That’s what even a “small” nuclear war would include. If you are lucky not to be within the blast radius of one of those, it may not ruin your day, but soon enough, it will ruin your whole life.

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Since Russia launched its most recent invasion of Ukraine in February, Moscow has threatened—sometimes subtly, other times explicitly—nuclear escalation should the war not go its way. Ukraine and the West have to take such threats seriously. But the Kremlin also needs to take their probable responses seriously and would have to weigh the substantial risks and costs of using a nuclear weapon.

Shortly after Russian forces assaulted Ukraine on Feb. 24, Vladimir Putin ordered a “special combat readiness” status for Russian nuclear forces. But it’s unclear what that means since the Pentagon has consistently said it sees no change in Russia’s nuclear posture. The alert may have amounted to little more than additional command post staffing.

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